Death. What happens after it? What lies beneath the surface?
Poor Arielle Daniels stumbled through dangerous hoops to figure this out. She wakes in a new place--the Void--and discovers that what waits after death are layers, dimensions, and sadly...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Trying his hardest not to stomp—the floorboards weren't the most stable he'd ever walked on—Benny arrived in the middle bedroom, where Kylie had summoned him.
"This had better be good," he said, groaning as a stench of stale dust and decay hit his nostrils. "Ew, what the heck happened up here?"
"No clue." Kylie appeared on his camera screen, pinching her nose. "It's been like that for the past few minutes, and it's disgusting, for sure. Rotten eggs?"
Benny fought a gag. He was used to odd smells in haunted places, but this one was pungent and foul. "Dunno. So what did you want?"
Kylie motioned for him to follow her to the mirror hanging on a wall near the door. "Look at this." She pointed her flashlight at it. "I guarantee it wasn't there yesterday."
Directing the camera at the reflective surface, he felt his lungs tighten as he sighted what Kylie had discovered. In thick, childish-looking handwriting, a message scrawled across the glass. The substance used to create the letters dripped down to the frame and was about to drizzle onto the ground.
GO AWAY NOW
"Fuck." He stepped backwards, recoiling as if the words were about to jump out and attack him. The go away part was threatening enough, but the now... that was ominous. If not downright evil. "No, that definitely wasn't there yesterday, I agree."
A mix of angst and adrenaline swirled in his gut as he got out his phone and snapped a few pictures. Proving that he and Kylie hadn't written the words themselves would be tough, but he also had nothing in his bag or on his person that he could have used to compose it. And that color—a maroon shade that looked like blood fused with mud, with the texture of paint but watery, oozing—wasn't something he could reproduce.
That's... nasty.
"This is why I wanted to come at night, Kylie." He stuffed his phone back into his pocket and resumed filming the mirror, zooming in on every letter, every detail. Did whoever wrote this use their finger? A paintbrush? Their mind? Too many scenarios played out in Benny's head and his temples pounded.
"Fine, I get it... but this is creepy." She gulped as she wandered towards the window. "Almost creepier than the recorder being thrown."
Benny gasped. "The recorder!" He was still holding the Ovilus—which hadn't picked up on anything and the signal was weak—and regretted not switching to his voice recorder before coming upstairs. "I meant to listen to my earlier session. Now that I've documented this—" he gestured at the mirror with his chin, "—can we return downstairs? There was a definite presence down there."
Though she grunted—and muttered how much she hated this place, yet again—Kylie shined the way as they marched to the stairs and descended.
Once at the bottom, she shuddered so violently Benny stopped in his tracks and reached out to her. "You okay?" He kept the camera on her, struggling to figure out her facial expression through the night-vision lens.
